Yearly Archives: 2020

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“The Stars Are Its Eternal Nuns”

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Reading the new translation of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry, The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro — especially the section called The Keeper of Sheep — has brought reading the Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu) to mind.

In poem after poem, the “shepherd poet,” a creation of Pessoa’s imagination, insists that there is no philosophy in his approach, but anti-philosophical attitudes are in themselves a philosophy of sorts, especially when they pile up and reinforce each other in poem after poem.

Let’s dip into The Keeper of Sheep anew, where the poems are numbered, to sample a few showing the simple pastoral writer’s views. These new translations are by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari:

 

#22

Like someone on a summer’s day opening the door of the house
And peering out, face-first, at the heat of the fields,
Sometimes, suddenly, Nature beats down
On the sum of my senses,
And I feel confused, troubled, trying to understand
I don’t know quite how or what…

But who ever said I should want to understand?
Who told me I needed to understand?

When the summer runs the soft warm hand
Of its breeze over my face,
I have only to feel pleasure because it’s a breeze
Or displeasure because it’s too hot,
And that however I feel it,
The way I feel it, because that is how I feel it, is how I feel it…

 

#24

What we see of things are the things themselves.
Why would we see one thing if there were another?
Why would seeing and hearing be an illusion
If seeing and hearing are just seeing and hearing?

The essential thing is knowing how to see,
Knowing how to see without thinking,
Knowing how to see when you see,
And not thinking when you see
Nor seeing when you think.

But this (alas for those of us whose soul wears clothes!),
This requires long study,
An apprenticeship in unlearning
And a solitude within the freedom of that convent
Of which the poets say the stars are its eternal nuns
And the flowers devout penitents for a single day,
But where, after all, the stars are just stars
And the flowers are just flowers,
Which is why we see them as stars and flowers.

 

A Pessoa-through-Caeiro poem holds equal contempt (though ever so gently) for both the scientist who must know why and for the poet who must see or feel something that is not there. That Pessoa uses metaphor himself to make the point is not intended as ironic, it just is.

And if saying something just is and so should just be seen for what it is strikes you as strange, then you, too, require some unlearning. For a good start, you can read all of The Keeper of Sheep.

 

“A Clean, Green Light”

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fern

You can coach youth, teach it, even try to bend it to your will, but it is marvelously self-reliant, something Ralph Waldo Emerson might admire.

Parenting, you see, is about as inexact a science as you’ll ever find. Each child is unique, and while some parents may second guess or regret things done and not done as their child grew up, it is a fool’s errand to find blame in yourself alone.

Kids have their say, in fact must have their say. That’s part of growing up. And how much of their decision-making is independent as opposed to ruled by nature or parent, no one can ever know.

Poets use the parent-child dynamic often. Hope and love are invested in the unfolding project of a child, but the investment accrues its own interest in its own time, and market forces are unpredictable, bear or bull.

Here is an example of a parent-child moment, a concrete anecdote used as metaphor in a parent-child poem:

Nature Walk by Gillian Wegener

The fern fronds glow with a clean, green light,
and I lift one and point out the spores, curled
like sleep on the back, the rows so straight,
so even, that I might be convinced of Providence
at this moment. My daughter is seven.
She looks at the spores, at the leaf, at the plant,
at this wise, wide forest we are in, and sighs
at my pointing out yet another Nature Fact.
But look, I say, each one is a baby ready
to grow. Each one can become its own fern.
But she is already moving down the path
toward the bridge and whatever’s beyond.

“Lit Windows Painting Yellow Rothkos on the Water”

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good bones

Late to the party (per usual), I found Maggie Smith’s poetry collection, Good Bones. Reading it, I found themes that resonated with me, especially the fascination with time and how it manifests in the form of poems touching on past, present, and future. Other topics she dwells on include childhood, motherhood, marriage, nature, and love.

For a representative piece, I give you “Twentieth Century,” which originally appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review. Like most centuries (thanks to humans), the Twentieth was pretty ugly, but memory plays interesting tricks, chief among them the propensity to sift out bad and magnify good. Maybe it’s a survival instinct.

See what happens when Smith personifies the Twentieth Century, directly addressing it. The poem has a confessional tone, almost like something out of a diary, something intended for the author’s eyes only but found by another reader, who can’t help but read it.

Twentieth Century
Maggie Smith

I must have missed the last train out of this gray city.
I’m scrolling the radio through shhhhhh. The streetlamps

fill with light, right on time, but no one is pouring it in.
Twentieth Century, you’re gone. You’re tucked into

a sleeping car, rolling to god-knows-where, and I’m
lonely for you. I know it’s naïve. But your horrors

were far away, and I thought I could stand them.
Twentieth Century, we had a good life more or less,

didn’t we? You made me. You wove the long braid
down my back. You kissed me in the snowy street

with everyone watching. You opened your mouth a little
and it scared me. Twentieth Century, it’s me, it’s me.

You said that to me once, as if I’d forgotten your face.
You strung me out until trees seemed to breathe,

expanding and contracting. You played “American Girl”
and turned it up loud. You said I was untouchable.

Do you remember the nights at Alum Creek, the lit
windows painting yellow Rothkos on the water?

Are they still there, or did you take them with you?
Say something. I’m here, waiting, scrolling the radio.

On every frequency, someone hushes me. Is it you?
Twentieth Century, are you there? I thought you were

a simpler time. I thought we’d live on a mountain
together, drinking melted snow, carving hawk totems

from downed pines. We’d never come back. Twentieth
Century, I was in so deep, I couldn’t see an end to you.

Truth is, everything is “a simpler time” when it has the advantage of living in the past. In the wrong hands, this can even be used for nefarious purposes (think: “Make America Great Again”). But in the right hands, it can strike a wistful tone illustrated by a montage of realistic images. Kisses in a snowy street. Opening the mouth a little. Lit windows painting “yellow Rothkos on the water.”

If you, too, are a product of the Twentieth Century, what belongs to the speaker becomes partly yours. Because the century of your birth is capable of two-timing more than one person.

Thus the appeal of poetry — how it is individual yet universal at the same time.

Of Masks, Poetry Contests, and the Quarantine Fifteen

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It seems I’ve been missing dates with this blog lately. You’d expect that in the busy season of summer, but not in a Covid Summer where one is supposed to be holed up in the heat (or ac) more than usual.

Thing is, summer this year is conflicted in its way. On the one hand, a lot of people are doing the same things they do every summer. “Bubbles” have expanded to Herculean size. Friends and family are considered safe by dint of the simple fact that they are friends and family. This is less science and more Fox News in logic, but it’s part and parcel of “Covid Exhaustion,” which takes more chances than its more reticent cousin, “Covid Fear.”

On the other hand, going to the supermarket is strangely unique from past summers. Everybody looks like they’re ready to stick up a bank or perform open-heart surgery. Masks, masks everywhere. There’s a certain comfort to wearing a mask when everyone else does, too. After a few minutes and the usual confusion of “choice fatigue” in the cereal aisle, the masks become invisible.

I live in a Jekyll-Hyde state and travel between the personalities fairly regularly. Maine has but two districts — the heavily-populated small one to the south (color it blue) and the sparsely-populated one to the north (color it red). In the southern towns, you can expect near universal compliance to the governor’s rules regarding Covid. In the more conservative, Trump-friendly north, the record is spottier.

District 2 compliance depends on the store. Many smaller ones do not require masks, so if you walk in, some folks are belligerently mask-free so you can better see their belligerence (they’re like walking, all-CAPS Tweets in that sense). For all I know, some of them think Covid-19 is a hoax and fake news, two of their fearful leader’s favorite terms. If anyone has masks in these stores, it is more likely women, the fairer and more intelligent sex. The men, apparently, feel threatened by it, as if wearing a mask were akin to donning a tutu.

So, yeah. Similar but different. Meanwhile, waiting for a vaccine is like waiting for Godot, at least for now, no matter how  you pronounce the word “Godot,” which apparently sounds different in French and English.

Poetry-wise, life goes on. Are the markets slower to respond? Yes. This summer, I’ve also pondered the merits of poetry contests. I’ve tried a few, but am beginning to see them as mirror images of the regular submission process.

Make that fun-house mirror images of the regular submission process. You’re more likely to be rejected, as is true with competitive markets that attract the work of established poets (who have a scorched-earth policy when it comes to taking up bandwidth in paying-market presses), but the contest game is more expensive by far.

What does this mean? It means you’re really making a charitable donation. You’re supporting the purse which will eventually  go to the winner, and you’re paying the poor staff that has to wade through all of these submissions, many of them poor.

Do you feel noble doing this? Maybe you do, but do it enough and you will no longer be a member of the noble class. At $25 to $50 a pop, these contests will bleed you like George Washington’s doctor (who many think killed the father of our country — and you thought the butler did it).

What you want, then, is a contest with less competition. One fewer poets have heard of. But just try finding one. You put your ear to the ground to hear its hoof beats and all you get is crickets. If a little-known, well-paying poetry contest falls in a forest, does it make a sound? That is your koan for the day.

Finally there is the issue of weight. Everyone keeps talking about the “quarantine fifteen,” the trouble being that quarantines seem forever ago yet the fifteen remain quite current. I’m lucky in this sense, only carrying around a no-longer quarantining (or rhyming) five. Getting rid of it is doable, if more difficult during ice cream season.

Did you know that New England is the number one ice cream consuming area of the country? You might expect the South or the Southwest, but if you did, you’d be sadly mistaken. This is the place to be if you are addicted to ice cream and have a phobia about bathroom scales, so enjoy.

Then write a poem. Then write a weighty poem about it. Just don’t enter it in a contest. Your wallet will lose a quarantine fifteen. Or twenty-five. Or fifty. Ipso fasto.

When Rejection Really Isn’t Rejection

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Why so quick to take it personally? Rejection of your writing doesn’t always mean the writing is not good. It can mean a few other things, too. Things you’d never think of because you’re not running a poetry journal (which requires a different sort of thinking).

A few weeks back I made a submission to a poetry journal in Europe. It was posted in Submittable with a deadline a MONTH OUT. I received a “rejection” the very next day, with the editor claiming they had been swamped with submissions and already had enough work to publish their journal.

I wrote back, which is not like me because I know better. Something to this effect: “Well, sir, as your posting is four weeks out, why don’t you have the decency to contact Submittable and have them yank it to save other writers the futile exercise of putting a submission together, executing the submission, and updating their writing records?”

The response to this wild and crazy idea sounded like this:  *** Crickets ***

Then I got the real answer yesterday — an email from this very same European poetry magazine. It was sponsoring a special introductory subscription offer of 40% off, featuring some of the very best poetry in the world (just not yours)!

Suddenly it dawned on me. The rising sun sounded like this:  *** Duh! ***

They were not in Submittable for poetry submissions, they were in it to build a poetry-readers subscription base.

And here we have writers constantly taking rejections personally. Look how creative some editors can be! And others may be rejecting your work not because it is bad, but because it’s good but not to their taste. Or because it doesn’t fit with the other works they’ve already accepted. Or because it’s free verse when they fancy form poems (or form poems when they fancy free verse).

Sure, sometimes rose is a rose is a rose and rejection is a rejection is a rejection, but buck up! Your entry might be accepted to a mailing list saving you 40%!

BTW, the response to this introductory offer sounded like this: *** Move to Trash ***

First-Person Point of Dock

kencraftpoetry Lost Sherpa of Happiness marketing poetry poetry poetry books

dock

Here in Maine, we are in the very heart of what I call Dock Days — mornings and afternoons where you simply while away time on the smooth, sun-struck slats of a dock jutting over a lake.

After a brief heat wave, more reasonable weather has come in. The humidity went to Miami for a few days. The heat signed a cease fire, agreeing to be agreeable, to be more “Maine-like” for the time being.

Dock Days inspired a poem once. I dug it out for a reread yesterday. It’s one of those poems written last for a manuscript (which would become Lost Sherpa of Happiness). One that never had a chance to play the markets and look for a home in some poetry journal.

I often like these orphans best. Never accepted anywhere, but never rejected, either. They just “are,” which is the perfect metaphor for whiling away hours on a dock, like you did when you were a kid and time held nothing against you.

 

From a Dock on a Maine Lake
Ken Craft

Lying here, side of my head resting
on the crook of right arm and gazing
from the grotto of my right eye,
I hear the water and see the creased
dam of my left elbow, the occasional bird
flying through its wild blond grasslands.

The left eye, though. It peers over
the tanned levee, sees the high gold-shot
lake—so high it threatens
to flood and marl the east shore
where clear sky, punctured by treeline,
seeps anemic blue to airy bone.

Shifting to my back I get the sky’s
gas-flame blue scribed by pine and maple
treetops, the firmament a forgotten
language from first-person point of boy.

And my God, the wind! Needles and leaves
nodding like anxious ponies,
wagging like old ladies’ heads
at green gossip. Trees exhaling a ropey
poem of clouds. White thoughts, broken
words, startled birds put to flight. They flock,
elongate, twist and split open like smoky time
seeking its own shore to roost.

“In the Trusting Darkness”

poetry

Family. Talk about a feel-good word with positive connotations. But we all know that in actuality it can be complex. One fraught with both wonder and woe.

There’s one thing we as writers can agree on, however: Writing about family brings a built-in audience. As readers, we’re all in this together because we’re all experts in the sub-categories of fathers and mothers, grands and once-removed’s, siblings and cousins.

The poet Jim Daniels is especially adept at mining the concept. Down he goes, spelunking into the abstract and climbing out with the concrete. Like any miner, time and patience afford him the luxury of small finds — ones that add up, ones that flesh out a poem and speak to the secrets of family hiding in the wide open.

Here he takes a minor moment — the quiet time most any parent can identify with — and makes it wistful. True, “wistful” can be dangerous (it borders “sentimental,” after all), but done right, it can be effective. See what you think in this poem about bedtime reading to your kids:

 

Talking About the Day
Jim Daniels

Each night after reading three books to my two children—
we each picked one—to unwind them into dreamland,
I’d turn off the light and sit between their beds
in the wide junk shop rocker I’d reupholstered blue,
still feeling the close-reading warmth of their bodies beside me,
and ask them to talk about the day—we did this,
we did that, sometimes leading somewhere, sometimes
not, but always ending up at the happy ending of now.
Now, in still darkness, listening to their breath slow and ease
into sleep’s regular rhythm.
They are grown, you might’ve guessed.
The past tense solid, unyielding, against the dropped bombs
of recent years. But how it calmed us then, rewinding
the gentle loop, and in the trusting darkness, pressing play.

Go Deep! Go Wild!

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Deep Wild

If you’re a FB person, I invite you to visit Deep Wild Journal’s Facebook Page, where they featured my poem “Thoreau Knows” yesterday to commemorate Henry David’s 203rd birthday.

The poem will appear in the print journal, Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry, the 2020 issue, which is scheduled to be released any day now. As I say of any journal that publishes my work, buy! I put my faith where faith is put!

So go ahead, FB types. Do some good for the little guy (Deep Wild Journal). Read their FB page. Endorse it. Then read it and, if you’re a writer and a lover of nature, submit to it for its next issue.

Your Future in Past’s Clothing

poetry

bee

The future is an interesting beast. It is always “out there” and yet nearby. You don’t know when it will arrive, just that it will. And when it does, it dies like the honey bee that’s delivered its one sting. No longer is it the future. Instead, too briefly to define, it’s now the present, and then the all-consuming past.

When I think of time, I think of Cronus consuming his children. The insatiable past keeps swallowing the future as it tumbles through the present’s quick portal. The regurgitation part of Cronus’s story serves metaphorically as memory.

Poetry is uniquely adept at tackling poems about time, and I collect them. Janus would be proud, whether the calendar says January (look back, look ahead) or not.

Here’s a “for example” that fits the bill. It is Mark Jarman’s poem “The Children,” which asserts that children know something we don’t — even though we were once children. Koans like that make the poetry of time interesting to read.

Go ahead. Sit by a grandfather clock and enjoy:

 
The Children
Mark Jarman

The children are hiding among the raspberry canes.
They look big to one another, the garden small.
Already in their mouths this soft fruit
That lasts so briefly in the supermarket
Tastes like the past. The gritty wall,
Behind the veil of leaves, is hollow.
There are yellow wasps inside it. The children know.
They know the wall is hard, although it hums.
They know a lot and will not forget it soon.

When did we forget? But we were never
Children, never found where they were hiding
And hid with them, never followed
The wasp down into its nest
With a fingertip that still tingles.
We lie in bed at night, thinking about
The future, always the future, always forgetting
That it will be the past, hard and hollow,
Veiled and humming, soon enough.

 

I don’t know about you, but I read this and get the feeling that the future and past are like Romulus and Remus, or Cain and Abel, maybe. Fatally bound together, sometimes in perplexing ways, but always in thought-provoking ways.

And me, I like thought-provoking. In poems that stir the pot — the one bubbling with futures simmering down to the past. Can you smell it in the air?

When Poems Move in Unexpected Directions

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Sometimes the little guy wins. Sometimes “very plain” makes its complex mark. Sometimes literal makes like Odysseus and journeys to a distant metaphor. This is the case with Ruth Bavetta’s poem, “How to Get to My House.” Let’s tackle the poem first:

 

How to Get to My House
Ruth Bavetta

From Los Angeles, where I was born,
take the San Bernardino Freeway east
past San Gabriel, Glendora, Covina,
up the hill by Forest Lawn,
down into the traffic clumped
where the 210 joins the 10.
Turn on the radio if you like,
there’s quite a way to go.

Pomona, Claremont, Ontario.
Here, if you want,
you can turn off at the airport,
catch a flight to someplace else.
Fontana, Rialto, Bloomington.
You may not have noticed it
but the road has been climbing all the way.
That’s San Bernardino on the left.

You’re in Redlands now,
the climb is a little steeper.
Exit on the Yucaipa offramp.
Just over the bridge,
turn right on Highview.
Stay there through two marriages,
a divorce, a child custody suit,
a brain tumor and a mother
with Alzheimer’s.
Soon you’ll reach where I live.

 

The pay-off, of course, comes in the final stanza. The first two read like directions your friend might give you in the pre-GPS era. You remember those: when you got lost but were too stubborn to pull over and ask for directions (I’m assuming you’re a male, in this case).

Then, wham. The last five lines of S3. You’ve arrived, all right. But the arrival brings an unexpected welcome. Not a hug, not a cold drink and warm meal, not a guest room, but a surprise. Two marriages. A divorce. A child custody suit.

It gets more alarming: A brain tumor. A mother with Alzheimer’s.

And just when you’re sure you’ve taken a wrong turn and landed at the wrong homestead, the finish: “Soon you’ll reach where I live.”

The poem lulls you with the quotidian. It all seems rather ordinary and list like. As a reader, you never suspect that you are being set up, that there is something surprising around the next curve, something as shocking as an elk standing in the middle of the road.

For an excellent tour guide as you reread this poem, check out Mark Scarbrough’s “Lyric Life” podcast,  which occasionally treats on poems famous and not-so-famous.

My hat’s off to Mark for honoring the “not-so-famous” as well as the overly-trodden famous in the world of poetry.

That’s a direction we all should take now and again.